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Bran Cookies
4 level t cream of tartar 2 C bran 2 small eggs or 1 large one 1 C shortening 1 C sour cream 1 pinch salt 2 level t soda 4 C wheat flour Nutmeg or cinnamon 1 cooking spoon molasses Drop from spoon on buttered pans and bake. 1 egg 1 C sugar 1 C shortening 1 C molasses ½ C hot water
A church-supper recipe written for someone who already knew what she was doing: no oven temperature, no baking time, and what looks like two separate ingredient lists run together. Read it as a framework rather than a formula.
- Two lists, one pageEverything from "1 egg" onward is almost certainly a second, separate cookie — a plain molasses drop cookie — that was set in type without a break. Do not add the second set of quantities to the first or you will double the shortening and molasses.
- The obvious typo"12 C hot water" in that second list is a broken fraction — most likely 1/2 cup, though 1 1/2 is possible; hot water is commonly used to dissolve soda in a molasses batter. No drop cookie takes twelve cups of water.
- Leavening is overdoneLeavening is generous -- Four teaspoons cream of tartar plus two teaspoons soda in four cups of flour is a lot of lift, and the sour cream supplies further acid for the soda. Halving both is closer to modern practice.
- BranPeriod bran meant loose, unprocessed wheat bran, not a ready-to-eat bran cereal. Cereal flakes are sweetened and pre-cooked and will absorb liquid differently.
- Sour creamIn home cooking of this period this meant cream that had naturally soured — thinner and sharply acid, closer to today's buttermilk than to the thick cultured sour cream in tubs. Full-fat cultured sour cream works but the dough will be stiffer; thin it with a spoonful of buttermilk.
- "1 cooking spoon molasses"Not a standard measure; take it as a tablespoon or so, erring generous. It is flavour and colour here, not sweetening — note there is no sugar at all in the first list, so these are barely sweet cookies unless you add some.
- ShorteningA cup of shortening meant lard, or a hydrogenated vegetable fat like Crisco. Butter substitutes fine and tastes better; the cookies will spread a little more.
- Oven and timeThe recipe specifies neither. For a drop cookie of this size, bake at 350–375F for 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges are set and browned. Bran browns fast, so watch the bottoms.
- YieldFour cups of flour gives roughly five dozen cookies dropped by rounded teaspoon. "Buttered pans" is now parchment.
Bran cookies belong to a run of early twentieth-century American baking that treated bran as a virtue rather than a by-product. Wheat bran, long sold as animal feed and millers' waste, was rebranded for human digestion in the 1900s and 1910s, and by the time cook books like this one were being compiled it had settled comfortably into home baking as a wholesome addition to muffins, gems and drop cookies. The recipe's other habits are older still: sour cream and soda as a leavening pair, molasses for colour and depth in place of costlier sugar, and quantities measured in whatever spoon was nearest the stove. Cook books of the period were often compiled by subscription — each contributor sending in a favourite, often in her own shorthand — and that practice is the usual explanation offered for oven temperatures and baking times going missing, and for two recipes occasionally ending up sharing a single heading in print.